Mischa Kroon

Introduction

UPDATE:

The kind folks of Ucertify.com have offered people who read this blog post with a discount you can get a 10% discount for this product using the following code:
MISKRO

You can download this product at:
http://www.ucertify.com/exams/Microsoft/70-305.html

Company

Founded in 1996, uCertify is a leading provider of exam preparation solutions for certification exams of all the major IT vendors. uCertify products provide certification candidates a complete coverage of exam objectives with extremely realistic practice tests, comprehensive study notes and guides, and other value added features to help them to excel in the exams.

Prepkit 70-305

This kit is supposed to help you train and pass the MCSD exam:

Developing and Implementing Web Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic .NET and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

Which is quite the mouthfull
Microsoft has the complete description here

Why would you need such a thing

Possibility's are:

• To prepare for a MCSD exam
• To train yourself without taking any exams
• To use it as an interviewing tool

Allthough when taking into account it's price, I think the only thing this should realisticly be used for is as a study guide for the exam.

What do you get in a Prepkit

You get the ucertify prep engine which is the quiz engine used to ask you the questions get the answers and give you extra information when you review the questions.

Next to the quiz / review part there are also some other helpers to get you to where you want to go:

• Exam Objectives - What are you studying for
• Study Notes - A whole lot of what is x ? questions
• Articles - Background information on things (.Net / Framework etc)
• How To's - Illustrated walktroughs
• Study tips - Where do you need to lay your focus
  

Look and feel

The look and feel is quite solid and modern.  "

You can see that there was quite a bit of polish has gone into the looks of the application.

Content

The amount of questions, notes, articles etc. seems good to me.

There are quite a few practise tests and the quality of information looks to be very good.

If you want to get a look and feel of how the application works and what the questions are like you can download a free sample from the internet which includes the application. The only thing is that a lot of the content on it is locked.

This means you get a pretty good idea of what you get when you get the whole thing.

The competition

Ucertify has quite  a bit of competition in the testing / exam preperation field some of it's competitors are:

Testking
Exam Collection
Braindumps.com

Ucertify seems to be at the top end of the market in terms of features / price.

Ucertify vs the Competition

Testking - Seems to be cheaper all round but only offers a question / answer engine. It is a more familiar brand but I'm not sure it actually offers better value for money.

Braindumps - Is free and seems to offer actual tests + community answers it feels more like cheating then like a preperation tool.

Exam Collection - Offers questions / answers only which seem to be community supplied. Price is very low as well.

Ucertify vs a course or book

A course will definitely take more time and probably more money I think this prep kit for me would be more effective then assignments with teacher corrections.

A book, this defininately beats a book by having the information organised in a way that it's very fast to access and offcourse being able to do tests to monitor progress beats a book hands down :)

Verdict

I think that if you want to get certified this is a product that you can use to save a lot of time without making you feel like you cheated.

It also comes with a money back guarantee, which means that you can get your money back when you don't pass the exam.

For me personally I think this prepkit could easily be the only thing I would need to pass the exam (together with some practice with all the things inluded in the exam).

That to me justifies it's current price of euro: 41,20.